JOURNALING

Resetting and Creating
a Space for Creatives

Life changes in an instant, instant after instant after instant.

One instant, you’re 37 years old and your biggest worry is having to say goodbye to your elderly dog, who tips over sometimes when he tries to stand up. The next instant, you’re 39 years old and every part of you has changed, traumatized by a series of personal and global disasters you’ve just barely survived, wishing you hadn’t, trying to rewind time, wondering where in this mad, mad world you could possibly fit and what in it could possibly make life good again.

And then you’re 40 years old. 4-0. You’re supposed to have four whole decades of learning and wisdom and accomplishments and friendships under your belt, half of your whole life’s legacy underway. At 40, according to my childhood expectations, you’re supposed to be managing a team of people, living in your own house and married to the love of your life, telling your four-year-old stories about how you traveled the world and met Mickey Mouse in Florida (if four-year-olds even know who Mickey Mouse is these days). But instead, none of that is true. You’re in Pittsburgh, visiting a friend from college, manic with nostalgia, attending your younger brother’s wedding, wondering where all the time has gone and why you always seem to be moving backwards when everyone else is moving forwards, trying to plan out a life that can, and has, changed in an instant, over and over and over and over again.

What is the life I want to live? How can I live it? How can I protect it? How can I make the most of it? For months, I had asked these questions to the universe, and after a while, suddenly, the universe actually seemed to answer. All signs pointed in one direction: Pittsburgh.

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CREATIVITY COUNTS | FINDING FLOW

Resolving to Make This Year Your Most Creative Year Yet

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish this year. There are a lot of projects I’m working on and excited about, that I have big plans for — though they are all fluid. The projects can each adapt and evolve, they can breathe and become something and I might not know exactly what that is going to be. I’m okay with that. What really matters to me, I realized, is that I actually take advantage of this moment of creative freedom I’m having, this flow I’m in — and not let it go to waste. After feeling so stuck for so long (the news cycle really gets to me), I want this year to be my most creative year yet. That’s my goal, and all other goals — the normal exercise goals and the organizational goals — rotate around it.

Creativity is like a muscle or an instinct — it needs to work out. It needs to stretch and flex. It needs to be nourished. It needs practice before it can be good. It needs you to survive as much as you need it. I believe setting aside time every day to nurture your creativity is as important as setting aside time each day to sleep, to eat, and to exercise (maybe even more important, if my actual sleeping and eating schedule is any indication). There are huge benefits to increasing one’s creative time — increased production at work, increased problem solving skills and resourcefulness, increased connections with others, having a sense of accomplishment, joy and escapism, improved willingness to experiment, branch out and learn new skills, a desire to have a more open mind and see the world through many lenses. Creative time and thought helps a person discover who they are, who they want to be and where they are going. Creativity is yoga for the brain.

And the thing is, making time for creativity isn’t painful — or at least, it shouldn’t be. You don’t have to be an artist to flex your creative muscles — (though you could always become an artist, with practice.) There are so many ways to add creativity into your life and into your schedule. Here are 7 ways you can resolve to exercise your creative muscles this year. (*They don’t have to be reserved for just one day a week.)

ZINE | AUG 2021 | TRAVEL |. ARTIST DIARIES. | NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY.

ZINE JUNE 2021 | CREATIVITY BOOK CLUB: THE CREATIVE HABIT by Twyla Tharp

FINDING FLOW:

Creating a ritual
and routine to Encourage creativity

Creativity Is Life.

Without it, we would not be here. Creativity is essential to humanity’s ability to adapt, innovate, overcome challenges, solve problems and brainstorm solutions. Creativity is a direct connection from our inner selves to the outer world; it is the way we express our selves, our thoughts, our ideas, our dreams and our wishes onto others. It’s not something that some people magically possess and others lack; it is one of the foundational characteristics of mankind, like having two arms, a beating heart and walking on two legs. Creativity is the muscle that connects our ideas to our hands, our bodies to our spirituality and our brings our thoughts into reality. Every single person is a creative being, but creativity is a muscle that, like every other muscle in the human body, must be routinely exercised to function properly.

"Creativity is a full-time job with its own daily patterns,” writes Twyla Tharp, a renowned choreographer and artist in her book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life.. “The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more."

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NEWEST ILLUSTRATIONS & COMPOSITES

Climb to the Windows

Where Sleeping Dogs Lay

WORK IN PROGRESS | POETRY + PHOTOGRAPHY

ALL THE SETTING SUNS

RECENT WORKS | MEDITATION ANIMATION

Horse in the Cactus Field

His name was Jazz, and once upon a time, he’d been a dancer. That’s what he’d been trained to do, dressage, though it hadn’t worked out well for him: he didn’t have the dancer’s body. He wasn’t tall enough or skinny enough. But he did have beautiful gaits, gaits that flooooowwwwwed.

For a long time, he was mine. I miss him every day. Our slow, quiet rides through the woods, just being able to focus on the moments with him. Just his very nature. He was a lot like me, or I was a lot like him, or maybe not at all but whatever, he let me ride him through the woods time and time and time again.

I kept him in a paddock, a field with a covering. Various fields, various coverings over various times, but there were these prickly pear cactus plants because this is, after all Texas, and I love prickly pear plants. They kind of remind me of myself just a little bit in different ways, but if you think about nature enough, all of nature will do that in some way.

I didn’t get out to see him enough, not nearly as much as I wanted to. But sometimes. I close my eyes and remember those rides. I haven’t ridden a horse since he died. It was just like dominoes, and he was the first. Then one thing and another. It was like I had this rock, this mountain keeping me in place, and then it just was gone. After him, everything caved and you know all of #2020 and then suddenly it’s been a year, 18 months, and counting. Day after day after day of this part of my soul missing.

But when I close my eyes, sometimes he comes up to me, and we just stand there, together in some place that exists somewhere else, somehow else.

WORK IN PROGRESS | MIXED MEDIA | CHILDREN’S ILLUSTRATIONS

Olive

She was just so different that it was like she came from another place entirely.

Olive had just shown up one day, a stranger in a strange land. She’d spent her first few days watching and observing from various hiding spaces: the inside of a bottle, underneath abandoned seashells, in nooks and crannies and crevices where she just seemed to disappear, the ever-changing colors of her skin matching her environment nearly perfectly. But soon she had deemed her new world to be no threat to her, and she began building herself a home. She’d come to this new land with nothing but her wits, but she had great wits about her. She could learn everything she ever wanted to know about something just by touching it, could feel and see a thousand different things all at once: whether something was happy or sad, where it came from, what it was made out of.

Within no time at all, she’d become the obsession of all the locals, who would swarm to her in droves whenever she made an appearance. They were a talkative bunch at first, the shellfish, but Olive was a silent one. She never actually said a word. She didn’t speak their language; she didn’t speak at all. After a while, the shellfish, having run out of words to say, stopped saying anything at all. They just listened extra hard, watched and observed her as she ran across the ocean floor, collecting and gathering all the abandoned things, putting them together in a sculpture of found objects that soon became her home — the most popular place in town — and still more listening while she rested.

Sometimes when she rested, she would reach out and touch them, all her arms going all which ways all at once. Sometimes she would let her arm linger on one of them for quite a while, and in that listening silence, the shellfish heard something new: Not a sound, not a noise, not a word, not a voice, but a pulse, like a beating heart. And that, they found out, spoke volumes.

Book Recommendation (For adults):

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

SAFARI NIGHTS | MIXED MEDIA ILLUSTRATION

Quality Time

SEABIRD’S SONGS | ILLUSTRATION

THE BIRD QUEEN

She might not have seemed like the most powerful of creatures, being only the seabird queen. She couldn’t control the oceans, or the winds, or the earth. She didn’t have the power of lightning, or control of time. But she had what she had: a million winged creatures at her service, all over the world, who saw everything that could be seen. Their telepathy didn’t need words but they talked to her non-stop anyway. She was the world’s best listener and even her whisper carried across the galaxies.

TRAVEL | ROAD TRIPPING | ASSATEAGUE ISLAND PHOTO GALLERY

Photographs by Mighty.Beautiful

Wild horses. Sunsets. Seagulls. Seashells.

With sandy, shell-filled beaches, flocks of seabirds, and herds of wild horses, Assateague Island, off the coast of Delaware and Maryland, is one of those places you go to fall in love with the world again. Whether you’re following the herd (from a distance!) or watching the birds, inspecting the troves of seashells along the beach or taking a casual stroll down a nature path, the island has a magical ability to keep visitors peacefully entertained for hours.

I only had two days there but I spent every daylight moment I could wandering those sandy dunes with the herd, playing with the birds, finding tiny treasures along the coast. The air was cool and the breeze was soft and the clouds blanketed the sky like the tide rolling in and the rest of the world washed away like the rest of it was all a dream and this places was all that existed.

DECEMBER 2020 | YEAR-END REFLECTIONS AND MEDITATIONS | TRAVEL-IN

So It’s The End Of Another Year In My Creative Journey, And What A Year It Has Been. Sometimes All I Can Do Is Just Shake My Head At It. I’ll Open My Mouth To Try And Form Words, And Then Close My Mouth Again, Hit Repeat For Minutes On End, Because, Just, Holy Fuck. You Know? I Think If I Could Sum This Whole Year Up In A Phrase, It Would Be “I Don’t Fucking Know?”

But here’s some thoughts on what I think I know, heading into 2021.

[BACKGROUND MUSIC BY JEFF SOBOTKA]

WORK IN PROGRESS | CREATIVE EXERCISE | A COMMUNITY STORYTELLING GAME

SYNOPSIS:

The year is 2023. We are living in a post-pandemic dystopian future where mankind is unable to reproduce because what was originally thought to be a mundane flu-like virus attacked our reproductive organs. In the course of searching for a vaccine, scientists inadvertently discovered a way to mutate DNA to give every person a genetic super power — to enhance one of their most inherent abilities or characteristics, though there would be no telling what it would be, good or bad. Some “enhancements” could kill you immediately and others could set you off on a near immortal life of power and riches. Across the world, people debated whether they would get “the shot” or not. If they chose to do it, they had to agree to a complete lack of privacy, total surveillance by the government — though it also came with a guarantee of housing, health care and employment, if necessary.”

PLOT:
Aurora is an 29-year-old artist. She doesn’t want the shot; she doesn’t feel particularly “lucky” and she has responsibilities: caring for her dying mother. But after a long nightmare of seeing her future play out, and in dire economic straights, she signs up for the shot. And little by little, she begins to See.

Her power is called The Sight, and it’s an enhancement of picture-perfect recollection. It starts at first with her own memories — her legs feel wet and start to sway thinking of crashing waves on the beach. But then the recollection just keeps going, and Aurora is having picture-perfect recollections of memories from the extreme distant past and extreme distant space — stored in her DNA from millennia ago and galaxies away. And what those visions will reveal will change the world — if anyone believes her.

Aurora’s visions lead her into a time when two families of Gods — Matter and Antimatter — came together to meet and procreate on Earth — a marriage that only lasted for a few hundred years before egos and desires led the Gods to dwindle into nearly nothingness, through their own jealousy and destruction. Though magical and fantastical, the visions turn her life upside down; obsessed and addicted, Aurora will do almost anything to get another fix from her Sight, but her unique visions of time and space threaten the World as We Know It — leading for her to be hunted and persecuted by religions and zealots the world over.

As the world turns against her, questioning her sanity and reality — some are calling her the antichrist — and Earth’s population continues its quick descent and she battles her newfound powers and addictions, she begins to wonder whether she’s really seeing the past, or the future — and if it’s really all the same, what can be done to save humanity? Are there lessons from the past? Is knowledge really power? Do all powers corrupt? Can she forget what she knows and keep living in the World as She Knew It?”

BLOG | OCT 2020 | JOURNALING

Murmurations

Illustration by Mighty.Beautiful

Are we All one
or are we Only one?

And other questions, musings, exercises and updates

It’s October, 2020.

The world is in absolute chaos, so it seems - though it’s not quite chaos; it’s almost too orderly for that. Too planned. Too obvious with hindsight and with the foreshadowing of centuries of history which tell us all good things must come to an end. OF COURSE our democracy has crumbled, our voting rate was abysmal and people in power are corruptible and we always sweep our mess under the rug and there are no solutions we can agree on when we can’t even agree on basic facts. And everyone seems overwhelmed by the facts these days, and the lack of facts, and the disregard for facts and the consequences of facts. Fact: There is a pandemic that has changed our way of life — that has made us choose between family and friends, that has made us forgo the things we once did with near religious abandon - the football watch parties, the weddings and birthday celebrations and holiday parties, the happy hours and the fundraisers and the concerts …. we all know the list. It goes on and on and on. We’ve all sacrificed these joys in our life for the greater good, because our long-term health and the health of our loved ones is paramount, and our health care system is broken. Who can afford to get sick? Who wants to risk a life-threatening complication? Who wants to shoulder the burden of being a super-spreader?

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Petals & lilah

A meditation on Life and Death in alternate timelines

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20-Minute Art Project:
Alcohol Ink Art Coasters

Alcohol ink coasters are the perfect project for anyone who has little artistic skill, a busy schedule, and the need for creative meditation. Much like the joys of acrylic fluid painting, it takes just about 10-15 minutes to make several of these beauties, and there is something almost magical watching as the paint colors nearly come alive momentarily as they mix and mingle before settling into their more permanent resting places.

Very Short Stories Series:

The stories I tell myself before I go to bed at night.

Mama owl in the Haunted Sacred Woods

And she decorated their home with flowers and did the best she could. And in their nests, they wanted for nothing; they didn’t even know what wants were. But they were not safe. She saw the ghosts everywhere. #veryshortstories #seabirdstales #mamaknowsbest #trauma #tobecontinued

Some Owl Love:

Note: This illustration was inspired by my trip to the Hawks Conservancy Trust near London, a wonderful organization that hosts amazing birds of prey shows and other daily events.

See photos from my visit here!

WORK IN PROGRESS EXCERPT | FICTION SHORT STORIES: A CHARACTER NAMED SOPHIE

My name is Sea, like the ocean. It’s short for Sophie, but don’t tell anyone that. I don’t want anyone calling me Sophie. I’m done with that. It’s Sea, which I like, because I like to explore and the Sea is crying to be explored. But some people call me Cat, because C is for Cat and I’m a lot like a cat in some ways, curious and cautious. I’m a lot like a dog, too, and a horse, and a bunch of other things, but people forget that sometimes or just focus on the C is for Cat business, and I roll with it because nobody wants to talk about anything other than the weather. It’s been really nice here lately, 70 degrees and sunny in January.  Read More

Mental Health: The songs in my soul

Tongue drum meditations, because we all need to make some music right now.

WONDERLUST IN ISOLATION:

A tribute to the mountains I have loved… And more!

Mosaic Collage Series

I began this Mosaic Collage series while creating a series of backsplash tile designs for Waterjet Works, one of the premiere waterjet cutting companies in the country. All these designs are available as mosaic tile backsplashes for your kitchen or bathroom! (Backsplashes are made of tile and custom-colored according to the order.)

Illustrations from the Archives